She even went so far once, when Mr. Mortimer, the vicar, called, and brought with him a more or less distinguished doctor—­as to tell the professional man privately some symptoms of her husband’s queerness.  And his answer that there was “nothing he could prescribe for” added not a little to her sense of unholy bewilderment.  No doubt Sir James had never been “consulted” under such unorthodox conditions before.  His sense of what was becoming naturally overrode his acquired instincts as a skilled instrument that might help the race.

“No fever, you think?” she asked insistently with hurry, determined to get something from him.

“Nothing that I can deal with, as I told you, Madam,” replied the offended allopathic Knight.

Evidently he did not care about being invited to examine patients in this surreptitious way before a teapot on the lawn, chance of a fee most problematical.  He liked to see a tongue and feel a thumping pulse; to know the pedigree and bank account of his questioner as well.  It was most unusual, in abominable taste besides.  Of course it was.  But the drowning woman seized the only straw she could.

For now the aggressive attitude of her husband overcame her to the point where she found it difficult even to question him.  Yet in the house he was so kind and gentle, doing all he could to make her sacrifice as easy as possible.

“David, you really are unwise to go out now.  The night is damp and very chilly.  The ground is soaked in dew.  You’ll catch your death of cold.”

His face lightened.  “Won’t you come with me, dear,—­just for once?  I’m only going to the corner of the hollies to see the beech that stands so lonely by itself.”

She had been out with him in the short dark afternoon, and they had passed that evil group of hollies where the gypsies camped.  Nothing else would grow there, but the hollies thrive upon the stony soil.

“David, the beech is all right and safe.”  She had learned his phraseology a little, made clever out of due season by her love.  “There’s no wind to-night.”

“But it’s rising,” he answered, “rising in the east.  I heard it in the bare and hungry larches.  They need the sun and dew, and always cry out when the wind’s upon them from the east.”

She sent a short unspoken prayer most swiftly to her deity as she heard him say it.  For every time now, when he spoke in this familiar, intimate way of the life of the trees, she felt a sheet of cold fasten tight against her very skin and flesh.  She shivered.  How could he possibly know such things?

Yet, in all else, and in the relations of his daily life, he was sane and reasonable, loving, kind and tender.  It was only on the subject of the trees he seemed unhinged and queer.  Most curiously it seemed that, since the collapse of the cedar they both loved, though in different fashion, his departure from the normal had increased.  Why else did he watch them as a man might watch a sickly child?  Why did he hunger especially in the dusk to catch their “mood of night” as he called it?  Why think so carefully upon them when the frost was threatening or the wind appeared to rise?